Menu Autopilot is a free, open-source Drupal module from Wilkes & Liberty that brings hybrid navigation to Drupal: curate your top-level menu by hand and let each item's children build and maintain themselves from published content. It is to navigation what Pathauto is to URL aliases.
Drupal's menus are hand-curated. On a content-heavy or decoupled (headless) site, that means editors constantly rebuild the navigation to mirror the content — and a hand-placed link is easy to point at the wrong URL. The existing "taxonomy menu" modules generate menu items from taxonomy terms; none generate menu items from content nodes under a curated parent with clean, headless-ready URLs. Menu Autopilot fills that gap.
entity:node/<id>), so they resolve to your real path alias — never /node/N or an editorial route. It even ships a normalizer to clean up legacy editorial-route links.[node:field_nav_title]) gives navigation a shorter or decorated label without touching the page title.menu_link_content links, so the composed tree is exposed by any consumer — GraphQL Compose, JSON:API, or a traditional theme — with no extra work.drush menu-autopilot:rebuild reconciles every dynamic parent on demand; drush menu-autopilot:normalize-uris rewrites legacy editorial-route links to their canonical form.Menu Autopilot adds an "Automatic children" section to the menu-link edit form. Choose a source and the module keeps a set of managed child links under that parent in sync with the matching published content. Managed links are ordinary menu links — so every consumer sees them, and there is no virtual schema to teach your GraphQL or JSON:API layer. It only ever touches links it created, so hand-placed links are left exactly where you put them.
menu_link_content and nodeInstall with Composer:
composer require drupal/menu_autopilotContributions are welcome, and the module is released under the GPL-2.0-or-later license. For the engineering story behind it, read our whitepaper Composing Navigation in a Headless CMS.